QuirksBlog monthlies

Q1 and 2 2012 browser stats for 12 countries 2/2

After part 1, here is part 2 of the quarterly mobile (and sometimes desktop) browser stats for the twelve countries I’ve been following since Q4 2010. As always, the stats are according to StatCounter.

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What do you want to know about the mobile market?

Pretty soon I’m going to write the opening chapter for the upcoming Smashing Mobile Book. The provisional title is “What’s going on in Mobile?” and I’m going to talk about how the mobile market works, and what web developers need to know to find their way around 10 operating system, 15 device vendors, and 25 browsers.

Before starting, though, I’d like to know which questions you have.

If you’re a web developer interested in mobile but only starting out, or even having a year of experience under your belt, what are the kind of things that frequently baffle you about the mobile market? Which parts don’t you understand? Which mechanisms would you like to see explained?

Note that I’m not going to write about technical issues. No CSS bugs in Android WebKit, JavaScript engines in Samsung bada, or WebGL support on BlackBerry. Instead, I’m going to try to paint a picture of the market as a whole, with the intention that I (and you) can predict what’s going to happen next, which OSs or vendors will survive and which ones will go under.

So. Please ask your question now, so that I can consider it for the chapter. What do you want to know about the mobile market?

11 July 2012

WebKit as de-facto standard for viewports and touch events

Last week I got annoyed at the large differences in syntax for vendor-prefixed device-pixel-ratio media queries. I said, half in desperation and half as a threat, that it might be better to have only the WebKit rendering engine and ditch the rest.

Meanwhile I’ve had some time to think about it, and I find that I still support the idea of multiple rendering engines. Competition is still good, just as it was ten years ago.

More about devicePixelRatio

It occurs to me that my recent post about devicePixelRatio was a bit cryptic and short. So I will givde some extra examples in this post. Also, I did some additional research that takes screen.width into account.

Remember the definition:

devicePixelRatio is the ratio between physical pixels and device-independent pixels (dips) on the device.devicePixelRatio = physical pixels / dips